


Some Flare Out

by queensmooting



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst, Canon Universe, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-16
Updated: 2018-02-16
Packaged: 2019-03-19 08:32:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13700778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queensmooting/pseuds/queensmooting
Summary: "I don't want a stupid ring," Historia says. "I want you."





	Some Flare Out

**Author's Note:**

> posted this on tumbloure ages ago & decided to throw it up here for uniformity yeehaw
> 
> title from love love love by the mountain goats

Ymir drifts in and out of consciousness on the ride back to the wall. Every time she wakes she reaches for Historia. She never has to reach far.

“You idiot,” Historia says fondly. “You didn’t have to do that for me.”

“For you,” Ymir laughs. Every laugh needles her body, but she can’t seem to stop. “You only think you’re so special.”

Ymir blinks slowly. She looks so tired. “Historia.”

Historia brushes Ymir’s hair when she sleeps, watches the moon swell overhead. Something in the way Ymir says her name makes her feel brave.

The cart clatters until the wall looms over them like a parent and Ymir strokes the base of Historia’s fourth finger. 

“I wish I had something to give you,” Ymir sighs. “Some–some sentimental nonsense–can you believe I told you I’d marry you–”

“I don’t want a stupid ring,” Historia says. “I want you.”

_Don’t act like you’re leaving me._

Ymir’s already asleep again, and doesn’t wake. Not until everything goes to hell. Not until the last touch she feels is the cloud-light scratch of a titan’s nail at her jaw.

*

Sometimes she dreams of them dancing that night, under that swollen moon. In dreams her skirt blooms and flutters down to her ankles, freer than her regal wear, catching starlight with every turn. In dreams there’s a silk tie tucked into Ymir’s magnificently-tailored jacket, loosened by the numbers of times Historia’s threaded her fingers through it to pull Ymir down for a kiss. 

In her dreams they can kiss for hours, because Ymir isn’t hurt, isn’t struggling to keep her body from shattering in a blistering burst of heat and breaking bone. Those nights Historia wakes with a heart like a darkening bruise in her chest.

*

“She’s too selfish to let herself die,” Historia says at first, when anyone who remembers Ymir gets the nerve to ask. The lie twists in her heart. “She’ll come crawling back to me eventually.”

Then the new commander delivers a letter to her hands. There’s too many eyes on her then, too many questions. All Historia can think of is the faint scent of Ymir on the page. What she wouldn’t give for an hour without a crown, an hour to grieve.

Historia redoubles her efforts in the orphanage. Levi is eager to join her, and they form a quiet companionship. They don’t talk about the way it’s born of grief, of how it feels to carry on against the weight of losing everything.

Sometimes she sees Ymir in the children’s dancing eyes, their crooked grins. Sometimes all it takes is a few freckles in the sunlight to bring Historia back to her youth, to make her heart wistful again, no matter how long she’s tried to harden it. 

*

Historia sees the ocean alone, a hand on her horse’s steadying flank. She closes her eyes. The cutting breeze could almost be the sweep of an impossibly gentle nail across her jaw. 

*

Hundreds of miles away Galliard remembers another war through another’s eyes. He remembers how a transformed Ymir reached toward the girl on horseback with a tenderness he’d never known his titan form to be capable of. Somehow Ymir already knows they’ll never see each other again. 

He remembers the first time the girl made Ymir laugh, the first time she huddled close in Ymir’s bunk for warmth. He remembers how Ymir didn’t sleep the whole night, her heart relentless as the girl snored against her collarbone. How it felt, just to be trusted like this.

He doesn’t think much of this world, but he thinks they must have been lucky, the queen and the poor titan girl.


End file.
